Each game, he has his official assistants on the field and in the press box, plus the benefit of 4,000-10,000 coaching advisors in the stands.

And at the really big games, like last week’s Pac-5 quarterfinal against Servite, he has an additional 100 or so who have field passes and stand within earshot of the Jackrabbits head coach, lending him their sage advice and wisdom, suggesting some plays and bemoaning those he made.

So one can facetiously understand why all the Poly assistants are so disappointed that the perennial CIF power went 6-6 with all of their help.

Lara has been around long enough – he’s a former player and has been a coach for almost two decades – to understand that Poly is a micro version of USC, that everything he does has the same kind of cause-and-effect. Poly has been around for a century and the success to match that history beyond mere time. Poly has oodles of alums and football fans who stay close to the program.

When Friday’s highly competitive and entertaining game was over, the werewolves that weren’t cast in “Twilight” came out to bark at his decisions. Actually, they didn’t even wait for the game to be over.

Walking down the steps from the press box, I casually listened to what the fans were saying, and wanted to put my hands over the ears of some of the children in the crowd. Such language. Then I got on the field and realized what I thought was a brisk wind was actually the second- and third-guessing whizzing around the sidelines.

Like the whole Poly-Dylan Lagarde-Los Alamitos-Dylan Cook saga, I wanted to remind all of these fine people that this was high school football, a classroom in cleats, and that digressing on the coach’s abilities and lamenting a dropped pass by a junior or a missed tackle by a sophomore was sort of like rubbing that D or F in their face.

Such is life. Lara has a grip on it, and he has the final say when it comes to what the kids hear at game’s end.

“I told several people and the kids that I believe this team has learned the most of any football team we’ve had here, because we’ve been through so much adversity, and we didn’t quit in the face of it and instead kept working and got better,” Lara said.

“What we accomplished is getting a young team to understand what it takes to play at Poly and what it takes to win big games. These kids learned lessons that will benefit them for the rest of their life and will set a pattern for how this team works this off-season and how it will perform next season.”

Lara doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the chorus, usually only when someone asks him this question. He knows that the team’s success – seven titles since 1997 – has created a monster and there’s no way to put the 800-pound Jackrabbit back in the box.

He does pose this response: How did this team get better if there wasn’t some good coaching? Poly was crushed by Servite in the season opener, 30-7, opened the season 1-3, went through a quarterback change that saw the sophomore who lost his job quit the team, and then had its record league winning streak snapped by Lakewood.

By season’s end, they had knocked off Los Alamitos in the playoffs and lost to Servite again, this time in a game that came down to which team eventually ran out of time.

Unlike past Poly teams, the ’09 team didn’t have a lot of game-changers – no Melvin Richardson to bowl over defenders, no Terrance Austin to make big plays, not a single returning starter on defense. “We had babies out there, and what seniors we had lacked experience,” Lara said.

There were answers to the thorniest questions left over from Friday. Why didn’t Poly use Kaelin Clay more at running back? He had rushed for 382 yards his three games since moving to the backfield.

Answer: Clay is generously listed at 5-11 and 175, and the kind of hits a receiver takes are different than those of a back. He had only five carries in the first half and finished with 15 for 135, including his 64-yard burst for a touchdown that gave Poly the lead with four-plus minutes left.

But that’s not the visual Lara remembers. “If you saw how beat up this kid was, you’d know why we played other (backs),” he said. “The trainers pulled his shirt up at halftime and I went over to see why, and he had tons of scratches and bruises on his back from where Servite players grabbed him and hit him.

“He wasn’t ready to be a 30-carry running back. Plus, when we use him in the backfield, we lose our best receiver. When he plays every down on offense, we lose him on defense. I had plenty of running backs to rotate into the game.”

What was the rational for his Bill Belichick moment when he ran a fake punt from his own 24 in the third quarter?

“We decided before the game that we’d take some gambles,” he said. “We were supposed to run the fake on our first punt, but it was fourth-and-long, and then it was blocked.

“We knew backed up that they’d come after us, so we called the fake. (Alex Roniss) had a huge hole, and then a defender spun out of a good block and just happened to trip him up.”

Lara said there were other moments like that. A missed block on a fake field goal left the play a yard short of a first down, and Chris Leachman threw to a short receiver on the last drive when he had a wide-open receiver deep.

There was also the phantom pass interference penalty on a fourth down incompletion by Servite that extended the Friars’ game-winning drive, but he’s not going to gripe too much about the officiating in a game that was played at 100 miles per hour and featured fierce hitting.

“It was one of those games where if everything had gone right, we win,” Lara said. “It also was a game I could walk away from and think that maybe Servite is destined to win it all.”

All he really knows is that Poly will be better for the experience. No one will take championships for granted, for a while, and he will return a lot of starters, especially on defense. “I told everyone at the start of the season that this would be a difficult season,” he said. “I’ll tell anyone who asks that we’ll be back next season.”